Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects how everyday objects, like chairs, evolve in our perception from technological innovations to mere commonplace items over time.
Douglas Adams highlights the journey of technological development as something that, once established, fades into the background of everyday life. We often forget the complexity and thought that went into creating simple objects because they become so integrated into our daily routine that we take them for granted. Adams reminds us that even the most ordinary items have a history of innovation and adaptation behind them.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about innovation in design, one could use this quote to illustrate how common items evolve over time.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
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For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.
People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.